Freshest Food

Best Raw Bar

Bistro on Main

“You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces, just good food from quality ingredients” – Julia Child

The Bistro on Main and Chatham Raw Bar is the latest incarnation of local restaurateur, Steve Vining, located in the heart of Chatham’s Main Street. Since 1991, we continue to bring together fresh food, fine wine, and good friends. We pride ourselves on using locally sourced ingredients to create delicious meals from coastal cuisines to Mediterranean dishes, as well as vegetarian and gluten-free options.

Whether you choose to sit in our dining room, outdoor patio, or nautical-inspired Raw Bar, we offer a quality selection of premium spirits, wines, beers and local food prepared and beautifully presented by our friendly, veteran staff in a relaxed and intimate setting. Executive Chef, Timothy O'Brien, invites you to taste his eclectic menu with influences from around the globe.

We are proud to be Chatham’s go-to neighborhood Bistro where you’ll always feel amongst friends.

Tonight's SPECIALS

Guest Favorites

Bistro on Main

What they Say

Hector Bolitho

“Oysters are the most tender and delicate of all seafoods. They stay in bed all day and night. They never work or take exercise, are stupendous drinkers, and wait for their meals to come to them.”

Jonathan Swift

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

Guy de Maupassant

Describing Ostend oysters: "small and rich, looking like little ears enfolded in shells, and melting between the palate and the tongue like salted sweets.

Hector Hugh Munro

Oysters are more beautiful than any religion....There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.

William Shakespeare

Why, then the world's mine oyster, Which I with sword will open.

Roman Historian

Poor Britons, there is some good in them after all -- they produced an oyster.

Lisa Hilton

…it slipped down my throat as easy as original sin……and left me feeling mysteriously adult, sensually alive in a way I never had before, full of the promise of the future.

Jason Segel

A raw bar is a great version of a bar. It’s cool and communal and everything in front of you is so fresh

Ernest Hemingway

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

Lewis Carroll

A loaf of bread, the Walrus said,
Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed--
Now if you're ready, Oysters, dear,
We can begin to feed!

Henry Ward Beecher

WAn oyster, that marvel of delicacy, that concentration of sapid excellence, that mouthful before all other mouthfuls, who first had faith to believe it, and courage to execute? the exterior is not persuasive.

Isadora Duncan

Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply, 'In my mother's womb, probably as a result of the oysters and champagne - the food of Aphrodite.'